BookYol

Concept

Actionable Audience

An actionable audience is a group of people, often a small one, who trust your work enough to do something when you ask, such as reply, recommend you, attend, hire you or buy, as opposed to a large audience that only watches.

Mark W. Schaefer makes the actionable audience the last step in Known and the real measure of the steps before it. Choosing an interest, finding a space and publishing steadily matter only if they produce people who will act. Follower counts can mislead here: a large audience gathered through trends or giveaways may scroll past everything you ask for, while a few hundred people who have learned from you for a year will answer a question, share a post, recommend you for a job or come to an event. Schaefer argues that this kind of audience is built through consistency and genuine connection over time: showing up in the same space, being useful, replying to people and treating the relationship as a two-way one. For anyone building a personal brand, the practical consequence is a change of scoreboard. Instead of counting followers or impressions, count actions: replies, introductions, invitations, enquiries and conversations that led somewhere. Those numbers grow slowly and flatter less, but they track what a personal brand is for. A useful habit is to ask your audience for small, specific things now and then, so that you know whether it is actionable before you need it to be.

A real-life example

Tuba teaches ceramics in Çanakkale and had a newsletter of about four hundred readers, a number she used to find embarrassing next to accounts with tens of thousands of followers. For two years she had written to them every Sunday about glazes, kilns and mistakes. When she opened a weekend workshop and mentioned it once in the newsletter, the twelve places filled in a day, and three readers brought friends to the next one.

How to use it

  1. 1For one month, stop tracking followers and track actions instead: replies, recommendations, invitations and enquiries.
  2. 2This week, ask your audience one small, specific thing, such as a question to answer, and count who responds.
  3. 3Reply personally to everyone who acts; that is how an audience turns into relationships.